Tuesday, September 1, 2020

Podcasts, new LGBT ministry win big at Catholic entrepreneurship competition September 1, 2020 CNA Daily News

Podcasts, new LGBT ministry win big at Catholic entrepreneurship competition

September 1, 2020 CNA Daily News News Briefs 0Print

Denver Newsroom, Sep 1, 2020 / 03:00 am (CNA).-

Several Catholic entrepreneurs this week were awarded $100,000 each as investment in project ideas “that will make a profound impact on the Church and the world.”

The OSV Institute’s annual Demo Day, whereby Catholic entrepreneurs pitch ideas for a chance to earn a significant investment, was held virtually last weekend with some 400 attendees.

Over the past year, some 350 Catholic entrepreneurs submitted their ideas for consideration. By May, the judges had narrowed it down to 12 finalists, who presented their pitches to judges Aug. 29 via Zoom.

The three winning ideas— each of which earned a $100,000 investment— include a Spanish-language podcast network; an initiative to help parents teach the Catholic faith at home; and an organization designed to reach and minister to young adults experiencing same-sex attraction.

CNA spoke with the winners to ask about the genesis of their ideas, and how they expect the prize money will impact their initiatives.

Eden Invitation

Eden Invitation is a relatively new ministry in the Catholic Church that seeks to provide community, accompaniment and resources for people who experience same-sex attraction or gender dysphoria and who want to unashamedly follow Christ and Catholic Church teaching.

Shannon Ochoa, co-founder of Eden Invitation, told CNA that the ecumenical movement currently has chapters, called “hubs,” in three cities in the Midwest. The hubs lead retreats and online small groups to help build community, she said.

With the help of the OSV grant, they hope to expand to at least seven additional cities soon.

The idea that they pitched to OSV is called "Hearth and Porch," Ochoa said.

The "Hearth" portion involves forming the city-based hubs for young adults to join, where they can pray together and support each other.

The "Porch" portion consists of a testimonial campaign from Catholics who experience same-sex attraction— ideally to be released during June, aka "Pride Month," 2021.

Both Ochoa and Anna Carter, Eden Invitation’s other co-founder, experience same-sex attraction and credit their strong faith backgrounds with providing them the framework and the love for God necessary to stay and thrive in the Catholic Church.

Ochoa said one thing that makes Eden Invitation new and different is the attention they pay to the secular LGBT community, seeking to imitate that movement's sense of radical community and joyful witness— but in service of the Church's teaching, rather than LGBT ideology.

"It's a fresh take in the Church," she said.

Often times when the conversation comes up in the Church, people with same-sex attraction may feel "on the receiving end of ministry" rather than a part of a community, she said.

Ochoa said their ministry wants to encourage Catholics and Christians to be unashamed to talk about their experience of same-sex attraction, and also to be unafraid to proclaim Christ and the Church's teaching related to same-sex attraction.

Ochoa said the outpouring of excitement and support after their project won the OSV prize was very encouraging for them.

"The whole community was really moved. It's really more than $100,000…it's people's lives changed, it's hearts knowing that they have a space in the Church, and recognition that we're loved in God's eyes," she said.

Juan Diego Network

José Manuel De Urquidi, founder and CEO of JDN, told CNA the project's goal is to "evangelize, inform, and entertain Latinos"— both in Latin America and in the USA— with high-quality, engaging podcast content.

In the Latino world, De Urquidi said, people tend to be culturally Catholic, but not well-formed in the faith.

In addition, he said, Latinos are consuming more and more podcasts, and the quality of Latino Catholic podcasts is generally not very high.

"It seems that the New Evangelization has not been reaching Latinos. So that's the idea," De Urquidi told CNA.

De Urquidi said he strayed briefly from the faith intellectually as a teen, and later went to law school, worked in the financial world for a time, and even started a craft brewery. He later earned a Master's degree in Mass Communications, and started a podcast, which grew into the Juan Diego Network.

De Urquidi has been growing JDN for the last year. He said one of the goals is to help Latino Catholic speakers, authors, and influencers start and maintain their own podcasts, at no cost to them.

With the grant he won at the competition, De Urquidi hopes to expand JDN's podcast offerings with new, highly produced podcasts and through more partnerships with Latino leaders. They also plan to host virtual summits to foster community among Latino Catholics, he said.

"The New Evangelization will get to Latino millennials and Gen Z, we are sure of it, and we are just a small part of it," he said.

Catholic Sprouts

Bill and Nancy Bandzuch's two-year old company began with a daily podcast for kids, Catholic Sprouts, which features story-based lessons designed to teach the Catholic faith.

The niche that their project fills, Nancy said, is a need for a systematic program for parents on how to be the primary faith formators for children.

Nancy launched Catholic Sprouts as a side project a few years ago, while working as a stay-at-home mom to their five children.

Today, they have a "small army" of contractors helping with the project, and Nancy says the prize money will certainly help with being able to hire more help for the project.

Bill and Nancy entered the OSV challenge with the hopes of getting support for the podcast and the written materials they are already producing. Now that they've won the OSV grant, Nancy said their goals are to create an app where their podcast will be available, as well as discussion questions for families after they listen together.

They are also hoping that the grant will help to accelerate Bill's transition from his current job to working on Catholic Sprouts full-time.

Nancy said parents have contacted them saying that listening to the Catholic Sprouts podcast with their kids was actually filling in gaps in their own Catholic formation, and was fostering deep and engaging discussions about the faith around their dinner tables.

The content is meant to spark conversation, which Bill says is an important factor in ensuring children remain within the Catholic faith as they grow up.

"If you're going to have a ministry for kids, in reality you're going to have a ministry for parents," Nancy Bandzuch told CNA.

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Can horror give hope in a horrifying world? There is scientific evidence that consumers of horror fiction and film are more resilient in times of crisis. This shouldn’t be surprising.

Can horror give hope in a horrifying world?

There is scientific evidence that consumers of horror fiction and film are more resilient in times of crisis. This shouldn’t be surprising.

August 31, 2020 Daniel Kempton, Anne Hendershott Essay, Features 4Print

The anxiety and fear that many are experiencing in these days of pandemic and urban rioting have emerged from a sense that things are falling apart. New data released by Mental Health America reveal that since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic in March, there has been what they called a “staggering” increase in levels of depression, anxiety, psychosis, and suicidality.

According to Census Bureau statistics, 24 percent of 42,000 respondents reported significant symptoms of major depressive disorder, and 20 percent reported symptoms of generalized anxiety disorder. Among young adults—those ages 18 to 29—42 percent reported anxiety, and 36 percent reported depression. These self-reported depression and anxiety levels are double those uncovered in 2014. We know that things are not as they should be, but we often feel powerless to improve them.

Still, some are more resilient than others. And although there are several explanations for why some are better able to cope with the chaos, including family supports, strong religious faith, and access to reliable sources of information, there is a unique line of research revealing that consumers of fiction and films focused on horror, pandemics, and “prepping” tended to cope better with the kinds of crises we have experienced in 2020.

A new study cited by the American Psychological Association titled “Pandemic Practice: Horror Fans and Morbidly Curious Individuals are More Psychologically Resilient During the COVID-19 Pandemic,” found that fans of horror films exhibited greater resilience during the pandemic and that fans of “prepper genres,” including alien-invasion, apocalyptic, and zombie films, exhibited both greater resilience and preparedness. These results are consistent with the hypothesis that exposure to frightening fictions—both film and novels—allow audiences to “practice” effective coping strategies that can be beneficial in real-world situations. Other studies have revealed that horror fiction and films can create an adrenaline rush that mobilizes the immune system and boosts white blood cells’ activity.

Stephen King would not be surprised. In his non-fiction book on the uses of horror, Danse Macabre, King writes that “a good horror story is one that functions on a symbolic level, using fictional (and sometimes supernatural) events to help us understand our own deepest real fears.” In some ways, the horror genre operates like fairy tales, revealing truths about ourselves and the world. As psychologist Bruno Bettelheim writes in his 1976 book The Uses of Enchantment, “the fantastical, sometimes cruel, but always deeply significant narrative strands of the classic fairy tales can aid in the greatest human task, that of finding meaning for one’s life.” Those who are familiar with fairy tales understand that these stories speak to us in the language of symbols—not the reality of everyday life. We know that the fairy tales of our childhood and the monsters, zombies, and aliens in today’s horror novels are not real, yet the real events in our lives become important through the symbolic meaning that is attached to such tales.

These stories are important when our major challenge is to bring some order to the inner chaos of our minds. The best stories of horror—like the best fairy tales—document the moral imperative that there exists a condition, and that if the condition is broken, then chaos and confusion emerge—sometimes death.

In Orthodoxy, G.K. Chesterton wrote: “My first and last philosophy, that which I believe in with unbroken certainty, I learned in the nursery…The things I believed most in then, the things I believe most now, are the things called fairy tales.” Chesterton sees fairy tales as “entirely reasonable things…mirrors of inner experience, not of reality.” As such, the message of the fairy tale—like the message of the best novels of horror—operate in the unconscious, offering us solutions to problems we may not even acknowledge to ourselves. The best stories address the existential predicament.

In fact, the best stories reassure, give hope for the future and hold out the promise of a happy ending for the good, the true, and the beautiful. Some of us seek out stories that give us a place to put our fears. Stories that frighten give us a way to explore the things that truly frighten us. The classic fairy tale gave the child an intuitive, subconscious understanding of his own nature and of what his future may hold if he is able to develop his positive potential. The child senses from fairy tales that to be a human being in this world means having to accept difficult challenges, but also encountering wondrous adventures and triumphing over adversity. As Chesterton suggests, children already know there are dragons in this world. The task of the fairy tale is to help children realize that the dragons can be conquered.

The best horror stories operate in exactly the same way. We already know that the world is full of fearful things. The list of the evils of 2020 grows longer by the day: the death of an unarmed black man in police custody; the young father—a Broadway star—who dies from COVID after suffering for months alone in the hospital without his wife and baby daughter by his side; the black police captain—a 38-year veteran of the St. Louis police department—who was shot and killed while attempting to protect a neighborhood store; the 6-year-old child caught in the crossfire of gang warfare in her grandmother’s Chicago front yard; and the thousands of elderly men and women dying alone in nursing homes throughout the country. Many of us have lost loved ones to the deadly pandemic. Some have seen our churches burned and vandalized.

Although we know that stories of horror can create stress and anxiety for readers, we also know that once the source for the evil is revealed and named in these stories, it can become conquered. For example, Stephen King’s 1978 book The Stand gives readers a dramatic choice between good and evil in his story of a patient who escapes from a testing facility carrying a mutated strain of super-flu that could kill the entire population of the world within days. Two leaders emerge, and survivors have to choose between following an elderly black woman named Mother Abigail, who urges the survivors to build a community to worship God in Colorado, and a Satanic creature named Randall Flagg, who encourages chaos and violence as the path to power.

In some ways horror fiction functions, as King suggests, as a “thermometer” because it tells us where we are as a society. We learn something about how we respond to fear, anxiety, and dread, but we also learn something about the world in terms of morality and the darker aspects of existence. Books like The Stand tell us how we can pull together and rise above our racial biases and do what we need to do in order to survive.

There are a number of helpful lessons that the readers of the horror genre can learn. First, the work of many authors within the genre, including Michael Crichton, suggest that biological threats are often the result of hubris—the desire to use science to control human life. This is true with Crichton’s Jurassic Park series and his later work, Prey, in which nanotech goes rogue. Similarly, both Dean Koontz’s The Eyes of Darkness (1989) and Devoted (2020) feature man-made disasters created in the belief that nature can be controlled and used for human purposes. For Crichton and Koontz—like Mary Shelley before them—the real monsters are not the creations but the human creators.

Second, there are always heroic figures to fight evil and villains who typically try to save themselves by devaluing the lives of others. For example, in Devoted, while a half dozen humans (and a courageous dog) risk their lives to fight the evil entrepreneurial scientists trying to create an all-powerful transhuman species, the villainous bio-tech entrepreneur has such disregard for the lives of his own team that he is willing to sacrifice them all in order to save himself and his dream for the future of a nebulous “humanity.” Similarly, in The Rain, the well-timed Danish series now streaming on Netflix, the evil scientists who claim to be “saving humanity” from a deadly virus by experimenting on innocents explain: “Everyone cannot survive…the effort to save mankind will cost lives.” The theme of killing innocent individuals for the “good of the species” was perfected by the Nazis and is a common theme in many horror stories.

Perhaps the most important function of horror fiction is that we find hope of survival in these stories. We begin to believe that we can conquer the demons—and the very real threats posed by the anarchy in the street and virus at our doorsteps. We choose these stories because we want to learn about ourselves and how we will react to these other-worldly challenges. We know that the stories will frighten us, but we also know that we can learn something from them. Carl Jung believed horror “tapped into primordial archetypes buried deep in our collective subconscious.” Aristotle believed in catharsis, and it is possible that reading horror fiction is a way of purging negative emotions and intensifying positive feelings when the hero triumphs over evil in the end.

These days of COVID and urban chaos remind us that what we took for granted in the past—sharing a meal with our elderly loved ones, attending daily Masses, shopping at stores that stayed open with stocked selves, and being able to walk safely on the streets of some of our biggest cities—are no longer available to many of us. Some have begun to experience a sense of despair as they see that the institutions they thought they could depend on in the past—churches, health-care systems, law enforcement, and our political systems—all seem to be collapsing in front of our eyes.

But as Christians know, despair is never an option. For those of us who find an escape in reading these scariest of stories, we are often inspired by these tales of struggle and survival. We know that the stories are not “real,” but the best of them provide reassurance that if we too are willing to fight for what is good and true and beautiful, irrespective of results, we will succeed.

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About Daniel Kempton 3 Articles

Daniel Kempton is Vice President of Academic Affairs at Franciscan University of Steubenville, Ohio.

About Anne Hendershott 94 Articles

Anne Hendershott is professor of sociology and director of the Veritas Center for Ethics in Public Life at Franciscan University of Steubenville. She is the co-author of Renewal: How a New Generation of Priests and Bishops are Revitalizing the Church (Encounter Books).

USCCB November meeting will be virtual, bishops announce

August 31, 2020 CNA Daily News News Briefs 1Print

CNA Staff, Aug 31, 2020 / 08:00 pm (CNA).- The U.S. bishops’ conference will conduct its November general assembly virtually, the bishops announced Friday, in light of the coronavirus pandemic. The bishops’ conference had cancelled entirely its June meeting in light of the pandemic.

“In a vote of 219 to 5 (1 abstaining), the bishops decided to meet in a virtual format rather than the usual in person meeting. The agenda will be finalized by the Administrative Committee of the USCCB, set to meet in mid-September,” the conference said in an Aug. 28 press release.

The bishops’ conference consulted with the Holy See before putting the idea of a virtual meeting to a vote. The ballot told bishops that the administrative committee of the conference had decided to cancel the upcoming in-person meeting, and asked bishops whether they approved holding a virtual meeting in its place. The bishops were also asked how long they would like the meeting to last, bishops overwhelmingly chose an abbreviated session taking place over two days.

At the virtual session, bishops are expected to vote on a successor to outgoing general secretary of the conference, Msgr. Brian Bransfield, and to elect several committee chairmen. The bishops will also vote on a final version of their 2021-2024 strategic plan, and vote on a 2021-2022 budget proposal.

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The New Under Ground Church-THE TRUTH MUST BE TOLD

Tuesday, September 1, 2020